Post Your Comment

22 Comments

Just what we needed. A nice new proprietary memory card that you can only get from an OEM included in a system. What actual interface type does it use? Can the amount of the flash that's reserved for ReadyBoost or ReadyDrive be changed? Seems kind of stupid if not, a total waste of half the flash you paid for. Even with 1GB completely available, in some cases that will be useless for speeding up hibernation since it might not be enough to store the system state.

For that matter, if you've got the money to be buying the flash, which is guaranteed to be more expensive than a 1GB flash thumbdrive, wouldn't you be buying with enough memory to start with, and possibly also getting a hybrid hard drive that already had flash (possibly more than just a piddly 1GB)? Really I still just don't see a point other than to sell more flash memory. Put more DRAM into the drives, they need it. With enough memory in the system, you already have a disk cache in memory that can be used for the often-needed data, which is faster than even the Flash. One of the big things with Vista is how it always seems to be using so much memory, and this is exactly the reason.

IS 802.11n ever actually going to be finalized? Or have they contracted beta-fever from software developers? And dang, that laptop maker is serious about keeping that wireless card in place.

The power consumption figures are certainly interesting. The only difference between two systems is the video cards and the CPU, and I doubt the Geforce 8600M consumes less idle power than the Radeon X1600. The power consumption figures indicate there may be a battery life increase of 25-30%. Reply

On the second page; "Despite the minor changes to the CPU, Intel has introduced a new socket pinout with Santa Rosa, meaning that these new Merom chips won't work in older platforms and vice versa." Reply

Why even bother with it? If Intel is too arrogant to provide something worthwhile, why do them the favor of reviewing their item. Am I missing something here? They send an item with two big changes - a new IGP and a new solid state memory that is supposed to be the greatest thing since Cheddar Cheese, and neither can be reviewed properly. It's either the height of audacity or stupidity, and I don't think they're stupid. My guess is they just want press for their items without having to reveal too much, assuming there is anything rational about it. I don't get it.

I wouldn't do them the favor of even reviewing stuff like this. They get exposure, albeit not particularly positive, and they give essentially nothing. If they want to play weird games, let them play it alone. Sending something like this is just arrogant. Reply

I've read that the Santa Rosa CPU's can shut down one core in single threaded applications and overclock the other core in order to increase performance, all while maintaining the same thermal envelope.

How much overclocking are we talking about? Is the performance increase tangible? Can you test this?

quote:I've read that the Santa Rosa CPU's can shut down one core in single threaded applications and overclock the other core in order to increase performance, all while maintaining the same thermal envelope.

How much overclocking are we talking about? Is the performance increase tangible? Can you test this?

Does one core shut down in idle mode anyways?

It clocks one speed bin higher(eg. 2.4 to 2.6GHz) when one core is idle(single threaded apps) and is available on non-extreme Core 2 Duo mobile processors. Reply

that with all the hype about the flash memory dramatically improving speed, that Intel would allow pre-release benchmarking to be done without at least a solid explanation as to why it isn't any faster. I wonder whats up with that. Reply

quote:In the CPU table on the 2nd page, what exactly is the Median Average Power value? How many watt the CPU use while it's on idle doing "nothing" and the OS is on?

Yea, you got the general idea of it. Intel isn't specific about it either. It's pretty ambigous claim. It's usually quoted as: "Average power consumption while doing typical tasks" or "Average power consumption while running mobilemark to simulate typical tasks". I'd guess it is office stuff like Word.

The Core 2 Duo chips on the Santa Rosa platform has enhanced deeper sleep power of 1.2W and the LV editions are 0.8W. I'd guess that's pretty close to what they are claiming. The more important power consumption figures are the ones in HFM/LFM mode. Santa Rosa platform adds Super LFM, and reduces TDP at that level significantly. This POS adobe reader won't load so I can't quote the figures, but the numbers are quite lower than the one based on Napa. Reply

I would have thought that the real benefit from Robson would have been the power savings from the ability for the OS to write to
disk/save something/do a small amount of swapping without needing to spin up the hard disk.

Regarding performance expectations, what's the read/write throughput on the flash, and is this a fast hard disk? I would expect
reading/writing a large contiguous file to/from a fast hard to be faster than reading/writing to cheap (= slow) flash.

If Vista can store part of the data on the hard disk, and the rest on flash, and read/write both chunks simultaneously
or the flash has throughput as fast/faster as the hard disk then I would hope to see performance benefits. Reply